May 6, 2013

NodeXL series highlights free tool for data visualization of social media

With an abundance of data from social media platforms, various tools have been created to extract data from these sites and then to enable ways to visualize the information. The graph below is a data crawl of the USGAO account on Twitter, the microblogging site.

A free and open-source add-on to Microsoft Excel, NodeXL is one of the foremost tools that enable analysis of social media information. NodeXL, Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel, enables the visualization of social data in network diagrams. It also enables the extraction of social media platform data from spaces such as Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and in a fairly limited way, Facebook, through the application programming interfaces, or APIs, of these various sites.

With additional work, this software tool may be used to conduct analysis of email networks, wiki and blog networks, and even Internet site networks.

This 12-part series highlights some of the basic functionalities of NodeXL. Each part focuses on an aspect of the tool.